Tag: Anolis sagrei Page 1 of 5

#DidYouAnole – Anolis sagrei

On December 3, 2020

Photo by Alan Franck, iNaturalist

Hey!

Since we had some questions about tail curling in Brown Anoles last week, I figured we should just talk about them today!

Anolis sagrei, or the Brown Anole or Bahaman Anole, is a trunk-ground anole whose range originally included islands like the Bahamas, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. Brown Anoles are great stowaways and have now made it to the mainland US, other Caribbean islands and Pacific islands like Hawaii.

Brown Anoles can get up to 8.5 inches long (including their tail), and have a snout-to-vent length of about 55-60mm. They are, as their name suggests, often brown, but may also be grey. Despite the drab colouring, these anoles have a lot of variation in their patterns between individuals, with some almost looking plain and others appearing very striking with an array of spots, striping and marbling. Brown anole’s dewlaps are typically red-orange with a yellow border, but there are some who have splotches of yellow.

Since the introduction of another brown coloured anole, Anolis cristatellus (the Crested Anole), the two may be confused, but Brown anoles can be differentiated from them by the dewlap colouring (Crested anoles have opposite dewlap colours, typically yellow with a usually large border of orange), and if you can get close enough, by the presence or absence of light coloured ring around the eye or front limb stripe. Brown anoles don’t have this ring, but instead have dark eye bars (I like to think of it as winged eyeliner, that’s just how it registers the fastest in my mind). They also don’t have a light stripe above their front limb. Female Crested anoles have only a cream-coloured stripe down their backs that Brown anole females might have between diamond or bar patterning.

As we all may know ,they’re also very feisty anoles, going after questionable prey and prey larger than themselves. They are also one of several anoles that eat other anoles (and other lizards)!

Photo by Gecko Girl Chloe, iNaturalist

In the pet trade, Brown anoles with red/orange colouring are called Flame morphs, and lucky for you here’s a study on why that red might be showing up.

Photo by Sam Kieschnick, iNaturalist

I also get a lot of questions on Brown and Green anole interactions, typically about why Brown anoles are killing off Green anoles and here’s some posts to help answer that!

#DidYouAnole – Curly-tailed Anoles

By Chelsea Connor

On November 27, 2020

In All Posts

Photo by Steven Kurniawidjaja, iNaturalist

Hello! Hope you had a good Thursday!

I moved #DidYouAnole and shortened it for this week because of the holiday. We aren’t talking about one specific anole (or lizard) today, but just ideas on an observed behaviour.

Recently someone posted a picture of curly-tailed Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei) noting that they had been seeing this recently with the brown anoles in their area.

This intensity of tail curling, while typical of curly-tailed lizards (they’re named for it!), isn’t all too uncommon in anoles. For curly-tailed lizards, their tail curl is possibly used as part of anti-predator behaviour, meaning it helps them distract a predator away from their bodies, or makes them look bigger. Anoles also use their tails in a similar way, waving them during aggressive displays against other males and predators.

Photo by Bill Lucas, iNaturalist

Lizards use their tail in various kinds of signaling and tail curling is one that we have been observing but don’t quite know a lot about yet! Has anyone else observed this or have any ideas about tail curling behaviour?

SICB 2020: Collecting Ecological Data from iNaturalist Observations: an Example with Anolis Lizards

By Laura Taylor

On January 9, 2020

In All Posts

Chris Thawley presenting his work at SICB 2020

Citizen science is a collaboration between scientists and the general public to advance scientific research. A major citizen science project is iNaturalist. In iNaturalist, anyone can submit an observation of an organism, which includes the date and location. It provides a database over a large area and a long time that would be extremely costly for scientists alone to collect. However, the data’s suitability for ecological analysis is uncertain.

To shine some light on the robustness of citizen science data, Chris Thawley, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College, worked in collaboration with Amy Kostka, an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island. When the project was developed, Chris was a postdoc in Jason Kolbe’s lab at the University of Rhode Island. As Amy was unable to go into the field, iNaturalist provided the perfect opportunity for her to experience the research process. They decided to compare established hypotheses of native green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and invasive brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) against the iNaturalist data. They first coded the anoles’ sex, habitat use, behavior, and morphology, and then compared their coded data against existing hypotheses.

Overall, they found that the iNaturalist data corresponded with existing hypotheses of green and brown anoles. Male brown anoles displayed more frequently than male green anoles, in accordance with results in this paper. Males had broken tails more frequently than females regardless of species, likely due to the more risky behaviors conducted by male anoles than females anoles. Green anoles perched more frequently on natural substrates and perched more frequently in a vertical orientation than brown anoles, in accordance with findings by Stuart et al. (2014). Additionally, the brown and green anoles’ reproductive time period (as measured by when hatchlings emerged) matched with the literature.

iNaturalist is a fantastic tool for individuals who are unable to conduct fieldwork, but still want the research experience. However, Chris pointed out that iNaturalist has spatial biases towards urban areas and temporal biases towards the present day. Additionally, it is necessary to sort and clean the data and to train individuals to standardize coding. This study demonstrates that iNaturalist is still a powerful tool and can be used to estimate phenological patterns, differences between sexes, and corroborate existing hypotheses. Chris hopes that, in the future, iNaturalist could be used to generate new hypotheses.

A Case of Cryptic Back-Introduction

By Jessica Pita Aquino

On August 21, 2018

In New Research

Figure 1. Native and non-native ranges of Anolis sagrei. Map from Kolbe et al. (2017).In this study, Kolbe and collaborators (2017) surveyed A. sagrei populations across Cayman Brac. First, they looked for red-dewlapped lizards to determine whether invasive A. sagrei from Grand Cayman have invaded Cayman Brac. Second, they collected brown anole lizards on Grand Cayman and Little Cayman to determine the source of red-dewlapped A. sagrei. For all lizards captured, they quantified dewlap phenotypes (i.e., reflectance spectra) using spectrophotometric methods, measured structural habitat use (i.e., perch height and diameter) and body size (i.e., snout-vent length (SVL) and mass), and genotyped ten nuclear microsatellite loci. For lizards with intermediate multilocus genotypes or with a genotype that did not match their island, they sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes (ND2) to test for nuclear-mitochondrial mismatches. Genomic data was combined with previously published microsatellite genotypes (Kolbe et al. 2008) and mtDNA (ND2) sequences for the Cayman Islands (Kolbe et al. 2004, 2007). With these data, they evaluated whether invasive A. sagrei from Grand Cayman have been introduced to native populations on Cayman Brac, and if so, whether invasive lizards have interbred with native lizards.

Under current trends of globalization, human activities impact the distribution of species by facilitating dispersal of propagules. Human-mediated dispersal prevents geographic distance from being a barrier to the introduction and movement of many species. These long-distance colonization events can gather evolutionary distinct lineages that might have been separated for millions of years (e.g., Kolbe et al. 2004). Moreover, dispersal events can potentially reintroduce individuals from an invasive population back into their native range; either back into their original source population or to any part of their native range. This previously undocumented dimension of biological invasion was termed cryptic back-introduction by Guo (2005).

Anolis sagrei is an excellent colonist, judging by its geographical distribution. This species has reached many islands and mainland areas in the Caribbean by overwater dispersal (Williams 1969). About 2.5 million years ago, A. sagrei naturally colonized Cayman Brac and Little Cayman. These populations subsequently differentiated into the yellow-dewlapped endemic subspecies A. sagrei luteosignifer on Cayman Brac and the red-dewlapped A. s. sagrei on Little Cayman (Schwartz and Henderson 1991); the dewlap (i.e., an extendible flap of skin attached to the throat) is used for mate attraction, male-male and interspecific competition, and predator deterrence (Losos 2009). However, this species failed to naturally colonize the third of the Cayman Islands, Grand Cayman. In the early 1980s, through human-mediated dispersal, a red-dewlapped form of A. sagrei established on Grand Cayman. These populations resulted from the introduction of genetically admixed lizards from non-native populations in south Florida (Minton and Minton 1984; Kolbe et al. 2004, 2008; Figure 1). Since then, inter-island supply shipments by air and sea within the Caymans could have transported invasive and native brown anole lizards among the three islands. Kolbe et al. (2017) explored whether cryptic back-introduction is occurring in brown anole (A. sagrei) lizards and the implications of this type of invasion for native populations.

Figure 2. Results of PCA for dewlap reflectance (Kolbe et al. 2017).

Kolbe et al. (2017) found no differences among islands in structural habitat use. They conducted a principal component analysis (PCA) for dewlap reflectance data using the average wavelength of each lizard. PCA results show that there is strong differentiation in dewlap reflectance between yellow-dewlapped lizards on Cayman Brac and the red-dewlapped lizards on Little Cayman and Grand Cayman (Figure 2), which supports their field observations of red-dewlapped lizards occurring on Cayman Brac (Figure 3B). This suggests the introduction of brown anole lizards to Cayman Brac from either of the two other Cayman Islands.

Figure 3. Examples of Anolis sagrei dewlaps from the Cayman Islands (Kolbe et al. 2017).

Furthermore, this study reports strong population-genetic structure among the three Cayman Islands and evidence for non-equilibrium. They identified intermediate multilocus genotypes between Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac (Figure 4). Also, the authors found an intermediate microsatellite genotype in one individual from Cayman Brac. This lizard had a red dewlap and a mtDNA haplotype from Grand Cayman. This mismatch among genetic and phenotypic data suggests that A. sagrei lizards (with different colored dewlaps) from Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac are interbreeding.

Figure 4. Results of a PCoA using multilocus genotypes from ten microsatellite loci (Kolbe et al. 2017).

This study reports the first evidence of cryptic back-introduction; however the frequency with which this phenomenon occurs is still unknown. By studying cryptic back-introductions we can eventually understand how lineages change though a brief period of isolation from its native range and determine if these are incompatible when brought together again. Likewise, future studies should address how phenotypic variation affects ecological interactions with native species and its consequences.

Article:

Kolbe, J. J., J. E. Wegener, Y. E. Stuart, U. Milstead, K. E. Boronow, A. S. Harrison, and J. B. Losos. 2017. An Incipient Invasion of Brown Anole Lizards (Anolis sagrei) Into Their Own Native Range in the Cayman Islands: A Case of Cryptic Back-introduction. Biological Invasions 19:1989–1998.

Cited Literature:

Guo, Q. 2005. Possible cryptic invasion through “back introduction”?

Kolbe, J. J., R. E. Glor, L. R. Schettino, A. C. Lara, A. Larson, and J. B. Losos. 2004. Genetic variation increases during biological invasion by a Cuban lizard. Nature 431:177–181.

Kolbe, J. J., A. Larson, and J. B. Losos. 2007. Differential admixture shapes morphological variation among invasive populations of the lizard Anolis sagrei. Molecular Ecology 16:1579–1591.

Kolbe, J. J., A. Larson, J. B. Losos, and K. de Queiroz. 2008. Admixture determines genetic diversity and population differentiation in the biological invasion of a lizard species. Biology letters 4:434–437.

Losos, J. B. 2009. Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: Ecology and Adaptive Radiation of anoles. University of California Press.

Minton SA, Minton MR (1984) Anolis sagrei (brown anole). Herpetol Rev 15:77

Schwartz A, Henderson RW (1991) Amphibians and reptiles of the West Indies: descriptions, distributions, and natural history. University of Florida Press, Gainesville

Williams, E. E. 1969. The ecology of colonization as seen in the zoogeography of anoline lizards on small islands.

JMIH 2018: Brown Anoles Have Broader Diets Where They Co-occur with Other Anoles

By Chris Thawley

On July 17, 2018

In Introduced Anoles, New Research

A brown anole (Anolis sagrei) surveys its domain.

Trophic ecology deals with questions about the ways in which organisms acquire energy and how that process interacts with the communities and ecosystems surrounding them. Anole-focused research has played a strong role in our understanding of trophic ecology and ideas abut how communities come together and evolve, particularly in papers by Schoener, Roughgarden, and Lister. However, many trophic ecology studies have focused on specific communities or locations and haven’t dealt with how the ecology of one focal species varies across space and as a function of the presence of other close competitors.

Sean Giery, a post-doc at the University of Connecticut, in collaboration with James Stroud, a post-doc at Washington University in St. Louis, worked to address this gap in our knowledge by studying how the trophic ecology of the brown anole, Anolis sagrei, varies across its range. Brown anoles are voracious predators of insects, known to chow down on a diverse range of arthropods, including some of surprising size. Since the brown anole is also a prodigious invader, it occupies habitats with a variety of potential competitors, including locations with few competitors. Sean and James leveraged this situation to their advantage by compiling stomach content data from previously published papers (including a follow-up on Lister’s paper above). They also added their own sampling, including in Southern Florida, the Bahamas, and Hawaii…tough work! Sean and James then used the articles themselves, field guides, and citizen science sources like iNaturalist to determine the presence of other species which might compete with the brown anole, including other anoles and diurnal, insectivorous lizards.

Sean and James assembled an impressive database of the diet of A. sagrei.

They found that as community richness increases, the dietary niche of A. sagrei actually becomes broader, the opposite of the direction predicted by theories of ecological release. Additionally, average niche overlap between individual anoles declines as community richness increases. When only brown anoles are present in a community, individuals are highly similar in the types and proportions of what they eat, another finding which runs counter to models of how niche breadth should vary when a species is released from interspecific competition. Sean concluded his talk by suggesting that interference competition may be more important than generally recognized and soliciting suggestions for ways to continue looking at this impressive dataset. We’ll look forward to reading the paper!

Anole Annals World Cup: Round One

By Christine Rose-Smyth

On June 17, 2018

In Anole Art, Literature, and Humor, Anole Photographs, Introduced Anoles, Natural History Observations, Notes from the Field

It’s June. It’s orchid flowering season in Grand Cayman. And with nods to #Anole March Madness and #MammalMadness it’s the opening round of the 2018 ANOLE WORLD CUP. #ANOLEGOOAAAAALLLL!!!!

Home Team – Anolis conspersus – against – Away Team – Anolis sagrei

And in less than 90 seconds it’s all over.

The teams are on the pitch

The Away Team

The Home Team heads to mid-field

The Striker takes aim

Home Team – 1, Away – nil

Drivers and Constraints of Within-Species Diversity in Dewlap Design

By Simon Baeckens

On June 6, 2018

In New Research

Sampling locations of the populations of study across the Caribbean. (1) Soroa (Cuba), population 1; (2) Soroa (Cuba) population 2; (3) Grand Cayman; (4) Santa Clara (Cuba); (5) South Bimini; (6) Chub Cay; (7) Andros; (8) Crooked Island; (9) Acklins; (10) San Salvador; (11) Staniel Cay; (12) Pidgeon Cay; (13) Grand Bahama; (14) South Abaco; (15) Cayman Brac; (16) Little Cayman; (17) Jamaica.

The dewlap is arguably one of most fascinating features of anoles. For me, it is the baffling diversity in dewlap size, coloration, and use —both among and within species— that makes it so interesting. However, understanding the origin and evolution of dewlap diversity in Anolis has proven a daunting task (Nicholson et al. 2007; Vanhooydonck et al. 2009). In an attempt to make (a little more) sense of the drivers and constraints of anole dewlap variation, a team of Belgian researchers from the University of Antwerp, led by evolutionary ecologist Tess Driessens, decided to look at dewlap diversity in Anolis sagrei. They surveyed 17 island populations of A. sagrei across the Caribbean and quantified dewlap design (color, size) and dewlap display behavior of both males and females.

Last year, Driessens and colleagues published their findings on how variation in abiotic factors (such as precipitation, temperature and other climatic variables) could explain much of the observed inter-island variation in dewlap design and use in A. sagrei (‘signal efficacy’ hypothesis). In a paper that came out last week, the team reports on the role of the biotic environment in driving dewlap diversity in the brown anole. Inspired by the wonderful study of Vanhooydonck et al. (2009), the researchers tested whether among-population dewlap variation could be (at least partially) assigned to variation in predation pressure (estimated by island size, tail break frequency, presence/absence of the predatory curly-tailed lizards, clay model attack rate), sexual selection (using sexual size dimorphism), and/or species recognition (number of syntopic Anolis species). Overall, they found only limited support for the idea that the extensive interpopulational variability in dewlap design and use in A. sagrei is mediated by variation in their biotic environment. Although they did find that males from larger islands show higher dewlap display intensities than males from smaller islands, and that males are more likely to have a ‘spotted’ dewlap pattern when co-occurring with a high number of syntopic Anolis species, the direct connection with predation pressure and species recognition remains ambiguous and demands further investigation.

In another recent paper, focusing only on the size of the male dewlap and their maximum bite capacity, the Belgian researchers asked a different question: does dewlap size signal fighting capacity (estimated by bite force) in A. sagrei, and is this true for all 17 sampled populations? And, does the level of signal honesty (that is, the steepness of the dewlap size-bite force relationship within a population) vary among populations, and is it linked with the strength of intrasexual selection? Their results showed that absolute dewlap size is an excellent predictor of bite force in all A. sagrei populations. However, relative dewlap size was only an honest signal of bite performance in 4 out of the 17 populations. Surprisingly, the level of signal honesty did not correlate with the strength of intrasexual selection.

Male brown anole biting on a purpose-built force plate. Photo by Tess Driessens

While the work of Tess Driessens and her team sheds new light on the drivers and constraints of dewlap diversity in A. sagrei, there is still plenty of study material left for future dewlap fanatics.

Anoles versus Geckos: The Ultimate Showdown

By Travis Hagey

On March 26, 2018

In Ask the Experts, Introduced Anoles, New Research, Notes from the Field, Research Methods

Two green lizards in Miami, one of each variety.

History is rich with great rivalries; David versus Goliath, Red Sox versus Yankees, Alien versus Predator, but one of the greatest match ups of our time is anole lizards versus gecko lizards. For readers of this blog that are unfamiliar, for which I assume there are few, geckos and anoles are well matched competitors because of their morphological and ecological similarities. Geckos (infraorder Gekkota) are the earliest branch on the squamate tree (sister to all other lizards and snakes) with over 1500 species around the globe, whereas anoles (genus Anolis) appeared roughly 150 million year after the origin of geckos (nested within the Iguania infraorder). The roughly 400 species of anoles can be found primarily in Central and South America. Geckos and anoles both independently evolved very similar hairy adhesive toe pads that help them adhere to and navigate vertical and inverted surfaces. While anoles can likely trace their toe pads to a single origin (and one loss in A. onca), toe pads likely arose and were lost multiple times within Gekkota, although we are still sorting out the exact details (Gamble et al., 2017). Nearly all anoles are arboreal and diurnal, with only a handful of terrestrial or rock dwelling species. Conversely, geckos can be found thriving in arboreal as well as rocky and terrestrial microhabitats day and night.

While anoles tend to get all of the attention from evolutionary ecologists, with decades of amazing research quantifying their habitat use in the Caribbean, geckos are actually older, with more ecological and morphological diversity. As my prior PhD advisor Luke Harmon can surely confirm, I have been interested in knowing how or if insights from Caribbean anole ecomorphology can be applied to geckos. How similar is the evolution and diversification of geckos and anoles? Do geckos partition their habitat along similar dimensions as Caribbean anoles?

In this post, I’d like to share some of my previous work comparing and contrasting gecko and anole diversification and habitat use and then solicit information and opinions from the anole community for an upcoming field trip in which we will be looking at habitat use of sympatric introduced geckos and anoles.

Fig 1. Our reconstruction of gecko (blue) and anole (green) ancestral toe pad performance based on our best fitting weak OU model of trait evolution. Horizontal bars below the X-axis represent the region in which we constrained the origin of toe pads for each clade. Detachment angle (y-axis) represents our measure toe pad performance (the maximum ratio of adhesion and friction a species can generate). The generation of more adhesion for a given amount of friction results in a higher detachment angle. Shaded bands represent our estimated OU optimum value for each clade. Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017b).

In 2017, we had two great papers come out investigating the diversification of toe pad adhesive performance in geckos and anoles, and the ecomorphology of Queensland geckos. In our diversification paper (Hagey et al., 2017b), we found that while geckos are an older and larger group than anoles, their toe pad performance does not appear to be evolving towards a single evolutionary optimum. Instead, we found that Brownian motion with a trend (or a very weak Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model) best modeled our data, suggesting geckos have been slowly evolving more and more diverse performance capabilities since their origin approximately 200 million years ago (Fig 1). These results assume a single evolutionary origin of Gekkota toe pads, which was supported by our ancestral state reconstructions, but ancestral state reconstructions are far from a perfect way to infer the history of a trait. And so for now, the true history of the gecko toe pad’s origin(s) remains a ‘sticky’ issue. Conversely, adhesive performance in anoles appears to be pinned to a single optima in which anoles quickly reached after their split from their padless sister group (i.e. a strong Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, Fig 1).

Given these results and the fact that geckos are such a morphologically diverse group, living on multiple continents in many different microhabitats, our results suggest the adhesive performance of geckos may be tracking multiple optima, and when pad-bearing geckos are considered together as a single large group, could produce the general drifting pattern we observed when we assume their ancestor started without little to very poor adhesive capabilities. On the flip side, we can imagine multiple reasons why anoles appear to be limited in their toe pad performance. Perhaps anoles lack the genetic diversity to produce more variable toe pads or they are mechanically or developmentally constrained to a limited area of performance space. Alternatively, since anoles are nearly all arboreal and diurnal in new world tropical environments, it is possible that they are all succeeding in the same adaptive zone and there isn’t the evolutionary pressure or opportunity to evolve more diverse performance capabilities. Closer studies of the adhesive performance capabilities of the few anoles species that have branched out from arboreal microhabitats, such as the rock dwelling aquatic species would be really interesting!

Fig 2. Our gecko and anole residual limb length calculations suggest geckos (grey triangles) generally have shorter limbs then anoles (black circles). Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017a).

In our second paper from 2017 (Hagey et al., 2017a), we quantified microhabitat use and limb lengths of geckos across Queensland, Australia and compared these patterns to those known from Caribbean anoles. We found some interesting differences and similarities. Our first result arose as we tried to calculate residual limb lengths and realized that geckos, as a group, have shorter limbs than anoles, which resulted in us calculating residual limb lengths for geckos and anoles separately (Fig 2). We then compared microhabitat use and limb length patterns and found that Strophurus geckos may be similar to grass-bush anoles. Both groups have long limbs for their body lengths and use narrow perches close to the ground. We also found other general similarities such as large bodied canopy dwelling crown-giant anoles and large bodied canopy dwelling Pseudothecadactylus geckos. Unfortunately, we didn’t focus on sympatric Australian geckos and so we couldn’t make direct habitat partitioning comparisons to anoles. We hope to fix that in our next project and would really love to hear from you, the anole community.

Later this spring, I am planning a fieldtrip with John Phillips and Eben Gering, both fellow researchers here at Michigan State University, to Hawai’i (Kaua’i and O’ahu) to investigate habitat partitioning of invasive geckos and anoles, specifically A. carolinensis, A. sagrei, and Phelsuma laticauda. Jonathan Losos one claimed that Phelsuma are honorary anoles! These three species are all diurnal, arboreal, have adhesive toe pads, and are commonly seen in Hawai’i and so we expect them to be competing for perch space. This has been on some of the greatest anole minds since at least 2011 with Jonathan wondering which group would win when the two clades collide in the Pacific. Previous studies of anole ecomorphs across the Greater Antilles and invasive A. sageri in the southeastern US give us a good expectation of how the trunk-crown A. carolinensis and the trunk dwelling A. sagrei should interact and partition their arboreal microhabitat, with A. sagrei pushing A. carolinensis up the trunk. The wild card is P. laticauda. There hasn’t been much microhabitat use work done with Malagasy geckos, and definitely nothing compared to the extensive work with Caribbean anoles. As a result, I don’t know much about exactly what part of the arboreal environment P. laticauda uses in its natural range or how it will fit in with its new pad-bearing brethren in Hawai’i. The best information we have to my knowledge is a study of other arboreal Phelsuma by Luke Harmon in Mauritius (Harmon et al., 2007). He found that while the Phelsuma geckos of Mauritius also partition their arboreal habitat by perch height and somewhat by diameter, they also partition by palm-like or non-palm-like perches. I’m not aware of any anole observations suggesting a palm/non-palm axis of partitioning and so this may be a novel axis that P. laticauda is using in Hawai’i to live in amongst the anoles.

Anoles, geckos, and Hawai’i have come up repeatedly here on Anole Annals

Reproductive Biology of Introduced Green Anoles in Hawaii

JMIH 2016: Anolis vs. Phelsuma in Hawaii

Amazing Green Anole Battle In Hawaii

A Case of Matestaken Identity: Hybrid Mating between Crested and Brown Anoles!

By Chris Thawley

On March 13, 2018

In Natural History Observations

Somebody needs to work on their anole species identification skills.

Breeding season is heating up for anoles in Miami, and at least one male crested anole (A. cristatellus) is a little…confused. While collecting some baseline data for my post-doc work looking at impacts of artificial light at night (ALAN) on brown and crested anoles, I noticed a commotion on a nearby cycad. Upon closer inspection, I realized that a male crested anole was pursuing and subsequently mating with a female brown anole (A. sagrei) who was decidedly unhappy about the situation.

In case you’re wondering about the colorful jewelry at the base of their tails, both of the anoles in the photo/video are bead-tagged to allow me to reidentify them from a distance. The copulation here lasted 3-4 minutes a portion of which I managed to capture on video.

While previous reports on AA have documented coupling between A. carolinensis and A. sagrei, I haven’t seen any reports of interspecific mating between A. cristatellus and A. sagrei. Has anyone else observed this phenomenon? The two species do encounter each other quite frequently in the Miami area, so this might not be a rare occurrence. Hybridization seems unlikely given the divergence between these two species, but you never know!

JMIH 2017: Removal of Curly-tailed Lizards Increases Survival of Urban Brown Anoles

By Chris Thawley

On July 16, 2017

In New Research

Interspecific Interactions Between Two Species of Invasive Lizards in an Urban Environment; Camila Rodriguez-Barbosa and Steve Johnson

An extensive body of work has addressed the eco-evolutionary impacts of the Northern Curly-tailed Lizard (Leiocephalus carinatus) on Brown Anoles (Anolis sagrei) (much of it receiving coverage right here, here, and here on Anole Annals!). These species co-occur not only on many Caribbean islands where much of this research has taken place, but also within the urban matrix of southern Florida, where both species are introduced.

Camila Rodriguez-Barbosa and Steve Johnson investigated the impacts of curlies on brown anoles in shopping centers in southern Florida where both species were plentiful. Camila first collected baseline data on anole and curly populations at eight sites before embarking on a quest to eliminate curlies from four of her sites. Over the next four months, she removed over 300 (!) curlies from these sites, many of which had brown anole remains in their stomachs.

She found that this removal had serious consequences for brown anoles. Compared to anoles from shopping centers where curlies were unchanged, A. sagrei at removal sites experienced higher survival and consequently greater abundances. These anoles also shifted to lower perches once curlies were removed, mirroring results from previous work which show that the introduction of curlies leads to brown anoles occupying higher perches to escape this dangerous predator. Camila’s work suggests that brown anole/curly-tailed lizard interactions may be similar even in very different habitats and provides a fascinating look at lizard life (and death) in the urban sprawl of southern Florida.